MUSIC/PLAY ON.

Shimura sees fear as a sign of good

Rapper is best known by name Lyrics Born

April 09, 2004|By Greg Kot, Tribune rock critic.

Tom Shimura, better known to hip-hop aficionados as Lyrics Born, knew he was on to something when he got a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach while creating "Bad Dreams," the song that would eventually lead off his debut solo album, "Later That Day" (Quannum).

"Anytime I work on a song and I start to feel scared about it, I know I'm on to something," he says. "When I feel that way, I know I gotta do it. If I'm not scared, that means it's familiar to me, and it means I've done it before or someone else has. `Bad Dreams' is not necessarily a rap song, per se, and I wondered if anyone was gonna be into it besides me."

Shimura sings as much as raps on the song, his voice bouncing off the percussive responses of two female vocalists while a clavinet evokes the doomy funk of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition." It's not exactly a straight-ahead rap anthem; in fact, Lyrics Born doesn't deliver a tradition-steeped slice of hip-hop braggadocio ("Pack Up") until he's a dozen songs into the album. "Later That Day" is loosely arranged around the events in a single 24-hour period, by turns mundane, comedic and profound.

"People are so used to hearing a hip-hop record with 20 rappers on it, and I didn't want to make that type of record," Shimura says. "But when you're in that type of climate, it's difficult to make a record that is competitive and entertaining with just one guy. So the challenge was how do I keep this thing interesting? That's when I came up with the concept of the day, because your moods change . . . your mind is occupied with changes, the temperature and the light change. It was a way to tie all these styles together and make it somewhat cohesive."

He pulls it off with a delivery that effortlessly incorporates everything from dextrous scat-singing to a gruff Jamaican dancehall accent, with stops in between for rueful black humor ("Cold Call"), megaphone-worthy funk ("Callin' Out") and haunting political commentary ("The Last Trumpet").

Boundary bashing is a pastime shared by Shimura and his Quannum labelmates: DJ Shadow; his old Latryx sidekick, Lateef; Blackalicious; and Lifesavas. They arrive en masse Saturday at the Park West.

The San Francisco-based label, originally known as Solesides, took shape when Shadow and the core members of Latryx and Blackalicious were attending the University of California at Davis in the early '90s.

"We started the label not because we wanted to be music-industry moguls, but because at the time we didn't feel like we had a choice," Shimura says. "We didn't feel like anyone would put our records out. When I was younger, it was frustrating because I wasn't being perceived in the same way as people I thought of as my peers who were more commercially successful. But I've seen every trend come and go the last 15 years, and to still be highly regarded and in demand after all that, it makes me realize we've accomplished a lot. That's a career right there."

Shadow's "Entroducing" album put the collective on the map in 1996. The dense, intricate collage of breakbeats revolutionized the art of sampling, even as the deejay chastised mainstream hip-hop for become a slave to marketing in the track "Why Hip Hop Sucks in '96."

"I could see why he said that back then, and a lot of people agreed with him," Shimura says. "But I didn't feel that way. I'm not one of those guys that longs for the good old days. I feel like there is so much more ground to be covered, and so many directions that the music has not gone in yet."

Born in Tokyo, Shimura moved with his family to the United States when he was 2 years old, and eventually ended up in Berkeley, Calif., where he learned Sugar Hill Gang songs from kids in the playground. The ethnic diversity of the Bay Area scene provided the foundation for a brand of multi-culti hip-hop that has thrived for decades in Northern California. "We used to watch break-dancing on Fisherman's Wharf, and it was like the United Nations down there--Latinos deejaying, Asians spinning on their heads, black and white kids battle-rhyming," he says. "It wasn't until I started touring outside California that I realized that wasn't the norm. It was much more segregated everywhere else I went."

If the Quannum label has a "sound," it's founded on that anything-goes, cross-cultural blending. "We've been able to create a special audience by drawing from so many different styles," Shimura says. "The hard-core hip-hop heads think Quannum is incredible. And then we get fans who tell us they don't listen to hip-hop, but they love our stuff. We're not afraid to be brave musically. We're not afraid to be inclusive and comprehensive."